


Tapestries

by Porphyrin9



Category: The Night Land - William Hope Hodgson
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-19
Updated: 2020-08-19
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:28:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25985902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Porphyrin9/pseuds/Porphyrin9
Summary: Presford Armstrong is an anomaly- no one knows who he is or where he's from, including the Watcher: a program dedicated to archiving every last piece of information in the world. Now he's on the run from everyone, and his only hope is lies in a strange new drug called Papa Q, which some say has the potential to change people's lives by entering their minds into a sort of quantum lottery. Shuffling their conscious minds with another possibility of themselves on a different timeline- a transit of conscious perspective. But everything has its price, and the Watcher never sleeps.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 1





	Tapestries

INTERLOGUE

It was 2:32 AM when Presford, one of the last remnants of mankind in a cold dying universe, pulled in to a dimly lit Motel 7 off the freeway headed North from Santa Fe. It was getting late. His eyelids drooped in sedation. He looked down at his hands. 

They felt bare and naked, free from the constricting metal wraps once made to hide him from the Watchers. His mind was filled with so many conflicting realities, stories from the library, foggy pasts and dismal futures. They all felt so cold and dreamlike to him now. Nothing seemed new, or real, or warm anymore. But he supposed that - everything felt distant after an eight hour drive or half a trillion years between perspectives.

Madá may have said, _“Consciousness is conserved, just like mass or energy”_. But time sure as hell wasn’t.

He flipped down the vanity mirror and looked at his irises which shined with an orange retro-reflective luminance back at him.

"I'd like a room please," he spoke slowly into the hastily drilled holes in a plexi-glass window. 

A small speaker-box chimed with a tinny ringing voice, "Smoking or non-smoking?" the woman asked sleepily. He did not know whether the voice was human or pre-recorded. 

"Non-smoking," he rasped. Not that he minded the smell. Not that he minded anything. 

"That'll be one thousand twenty."

He reached in his pocket and pulled out a few silver coins and dropped them in the curved metal slot below the bullet-proof plastic. After the Shift, paper was worthless, like it always was. But at least people stopped deluding themselves. 

There was a grinding noise and out popped a small brass room key along with his change. 

"Thanks," he said into nowhere at no-one in particular as he took the small key and made stride up the stairs with his small backpack. 

Inside the small room was a large bed, stale pillows, particle-board desk and the other corporate commodities statically determined to yield the best hospitality to cost value for the Motel franchise. 

He robotically sat down on the rigid bed staring into a bright brown tapestry on the wall illuminated in some cheap cracking parchment, printed off some lithograph mill by the lowest bidder. 

There stood a roughly hewn visage of cracking paint - a woman staring up through lush green fields at a thin grey tower that pierced the sky, where clouds wrapped around its peak and yellow wind streams echoed across its grey pinnacle.

He held his hand out in the air and, reached for the picture as he got up from the bed and put his hand on the cold glass frame. His hands left little rings of foggy condensation around his fingertips and those rings lingered as he tried to hold his thoughts on a fixed object. He looked again at the woman. She was facing away from him, toward the tower. Her head was but a dab of copper brown paint on the canvas separated from his skin by cold unfeeling silica. Her hair a brief flick of black brush copied and lithographed - thrice removed from the stalwart reality of the world. 

Up at the lithographed clouds he peered as visions of some arbitrary and questionable past darted before his eyes:

Towering white pillars of convective splendor in the fading orange sunset. The blackness of space above him, punctuated by a narrow strip of grey plastic explosive - a sober _Memento Mori_ in his flight through the heavens. 

He missed his bike, his canvas-like jacket, he missed the tower, the clouds, the girl. 

Like so many others he would pass through the isolated town of Santa Fe on his way to the remote lab at Los Alamos; where he believed he might find some sort of answer to the questions branded into his mind. Or perhaps he just wanted to escape the reality that waited for him at home, wherever that home turned out to be. 

Madá spoke of a crossroads at the Black Hole. Presford was determined to find out what he meant. 


End file.
